Re: Sewer-Generated Sprawl and Request for Treatment System
Information

My Duck Lake community has been resisting pressures to replace a
fundamentally sound lagoon sewage treatment system with long regional pipelines
that would encourage unwanted development sprawl across miles of agricultural
and open land. Our Calhoun County public works officials finally agreed to
consider any specific alternatives that our public could quickly develop, and
our helpful State Senator arranged for DEQ enforcement staff to discuss some key
requirements and potentially useful Michigan sewage systems with us.
Consistent with the nature of the entire process, however, DEQ staff declined to
conduct the agreed-upon meeting and we had to file an FOI request for the needed
information. Now the DEQ FOI Officer seems to be telling
us that the agency lacks the ability to provide basic information on
Michigan sewage systems. We can proceed without certain information but
would appreciate hearing from anyone who knows whether the DEQ can or cannot
generate lists of:

If you believe that the DEQ can generate this information, please try to
provide the precise name of the data base and other specific words to use in
obtaining information from DEQ enforcement activities that have been on the
pipeline side at every twist and turn in the process.

I would also appreciate hearing from anyone who knows of good, small
Michigan sewage treatment systems that we might wish to visit. We are
particularly interested in lagoon systems that discharge into surface
water. There include (1) systems that use the traditional clarifiers and
phosphorus reduction, and (2) systems that discharge into natural or constructed
wetlands.

Finally, many of you know how outrageous the Duck Lake situation has
been and how we have one of the fronts in a potentially much larger sprawl
threat. We haven't had much time to devote to the underlying
problems lately, but will always have time to answer questions from the
Governor's office about how the Clean Water authorities are being used to
push unnecessarily elaborate sewage "solutions" that would encourage
classic development sprawl.